我现在越来越觉得,很多人对 AI 的想象力,已经被自己过去十几年的工作经验给限制死了。
今天看到 Claude 工程负责人 Felix Rieseberg 写了一篇文章,叫《How to be more ambitious》,教人如何更有野心地使用 AI。我觉得这篇文章值得所有重度 AI 用户读一遍,包括我自己。
他给出了一套具体的方法。
比如,公司要做季度经营汇报。绝大多数人的第一反应,是让 Claude 帮忙制作 PPT,厉害一点的会把数据丢进去,让它分析一下业务表现。
Felix 认为,这才刚刚开始。
你可以继续要求 AI 找出三个最值得管理层讨论的决策,分析各自的利弊。然后再进一步,既然季度汇报的目的是提前发现问题、合理分配资源,那为什么非得做 PPT?能不能设计一套更好的机制,用历史数据验证它能否更早发现问题,再跟原有流程并行运行一个季度?
他自己也经历过这样的转变。
以前,他让 Claude 一次修复一个软件崩溃问题。后来,他开始直接要求 Claude 帮他持续维持应用的稳定性。为了做到这一点,他不得不让 AI 能够访问崩溃日志、代码版本记录,以及不同操作系统的测试环境。
我觉得这个案例特别好,因为它说明了,所谓的「更有野心」,其实经常意味着你得重新审视自己习以为常的工作方式。
Felix 还讲了另外两个方向。
一个是深度,让 AI 真正使用行业顶尖专家的方法、工具和原始数据,而非仅仅模仿专家说话的口气。
另一个是广度,把原本成本高昂的跨学科协作变成常规操作。分析一家公司,可以同时引入记者、数据科学家、做空者和法务会计的调查方法。
当然,他也特别强调,最终结果必须接受外部验证,不能让模型自己给自己打分。
看完之后,我一直在想一件事。
我们现在已经很擅长让 AI 替自己完成更多工作了。一个人开十几个 Agent,同时推进十几个任务,每天忙得不亦乐乎。但如果仔细看,这些任务可能跟五年前、十年前没什么区别。
很多所谓的 AI 工作流,只是给过去的工作方式装上了一台更快的发动机。
我觉得接下来真正值得拉开差距的,是一个人有没有能力重新定义问题,甚至敢不敢放弃自己过去认为理所当然的工作流程。
如果你对工作的理解只能到「交付一份 PPT」,那么给你再强的模型,最后大概也只能收获一份更快、更漂亮的 PPT。
AI 的能力每隔几个月就可能发生一次巨大变化,但人的思维惯性不会自动跟着升级。
这可能才是「更有野心地使用 AI」最难的地方。
"Anthropic told investors on Wednesday distillation accounted for 5 per cent to 7 per cent of revenue"
If true, and Q2 revenue was $11.5B, then that's more than half a billion dollars spent by other labs to distill Anthropic's models!
https://t.co/szd2oJxtrv
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.